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Monday, September 16, 2013

PC Specialist Vanquish GT1 review: great balance of performance and features

PC Specialist’s mid-priced Vanquish GT1 is the result of a sensible, measured approach to PC design with a strong selection of components designed to give a great all-round-gaming experience rather than throwing in expensive high-end parts in order to edge ahead in the benchmarks. See all gaming PCs.

The PC features an Intel Core i5-4670K processor pushed to a more conservative 4.2 GHz, where others tend to opt for 4.4 GHz. This results in a – still very fast – PCMark 7 score of 6763 points which is a couple of hundred points behind some of the competition. However, it features the same Corsair H60 liquid-cooling unit found in many of these faster PCs and comes with a 650W Corsair power supply which should easily provide enough juice to push it a little further if you fancy a little DIY tuning. See also: What's the best gaming PC?

A Palit-branded GeForce GTX 770 graphics card is installed which runs at stock speeds. It’s therefore a little slower than factory overclocked models found elsewhere, but unless you’re running benchmarks tests, the results are close enough for you not to notice any real difference.

It comes with a 120 GB Kingston SSD and 2 TB of main hard-disk storage, together with 16 GB of system memory. Additionally, an Asus Xonar DG sound card has been installed which features a built-in headphone amp, Dolby headphone support and 3D audio effects. The Isku keyboard and Kova mouse from Roccat are dedicated gaming devices, the former featuring blue illuminated keys and programmable macros, while the latter offers accurate 3200 dpi resolution and multi-coloured lighting effects.

The PC is housed in a saucy see-through system case, allowing you to gaze proudly upon the tidy cable management, modular power supply connections and slide-out drive caddies.

The top of the case features a handy SATA dock where you can temporarily slide in a bare hard drive for bulk copying or backups. There’s also a two-position switch where you can choose between ultra-quiet or super-loud fan operation depending on the prevailing cooling requirements.

PC Specialist has opted for a delicious-looking 23.6-inch AOC monitor, featuring a high-quality IPS panel with great colour reproduction, wide viewing angles and a total of four video inputs. There’s no Blu-ray drive included, but you do get a standard DVD burner combo drive. The system is backed by an excellent three-year collect-and-return warranty.